All consumers --
even audiophiles! -- want good value for their money, but too often
reviewers lose sight of that most basic tenet of consumerism. To
leave unaddressed in a product review the issue of value is to
neglect the very essence of what an informed reviewer should be
concerned with -- along with, of course, the host of other
characteristics that ultimately define a product and its place in
the market.

About six years
ago, when I lived in a rental house while my current home was being
built, I owned a pair of Dynaudio Confidence C2 speakers for just
over a year. The Confidence C2, still available for $13,000 USD per
pair, is a four-driver, two-way design in a tall, narrow cabinet
that weighs about 88 pounds. I really liked it. It was well balanced
if a touch warm, with full bass and meaty highs. The biggest
drawback that I heard was that the 87dB-sensitive C2 needed to be
fed a lot of power before it began to be musically involving. At
lower output levels it wasn’t the most expressive loudspeaker, but
at mid-level volumes and up it could sound fantastic.

Imagine my
surprise when I got Dynaudio’s press release announcing the subject
of this review: the Focus 360. Here is a three-way
loudspeaker -- as opposed to the two-way C2 -- that also has four
drivers, a cabinet weighing 81 pounds, and a retail price only
slightly more than half the C2’s: $7000/pair. The Focus 360’s
finishes of real-wood veneer are even nicer than what I remember of
the C2’s, and it includes some of Dynaudio’s best drivers, such as
the Esotar2 tweeter and cast-frame mids and woofers. The Focus 360
is also 1dB more sensitive, according to Dynaudio, at 88dB/2.83V/m.

From a value
perspective, the Focus 360 was clearly, from afar, a speaker that
held a lot of promise. That was all the prompting I needed to
request a pair for review.

360-degree view

The Focus 360 is
more impressive in person than the photos on Dynaudio’s website give
any hint of. It’s large -- 48.8”H x 9.8”W x 15.2”D -- with
substantial, seemingly very dense cabinet walls that taper slightly
from front to rear. In fact, when I saw the Focus 360 in person for
the first time, at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I exclaimed
to Mike Manousselis, Dynaudio’s head of US operations, “That’s
the Focus 360?!” I was surprised that it looked so attractive -- on
the website, it looks a bit boring. But at the show, it looked
bigger and sleeker
and had a nicer finish than those
photos had led me to expect.

The 4-ohm Focus
360 is a full three-way design, with a pair of 8” Magnesium Silicate
Polymer (MSP) woofers mounted below a 5.75” MSP midrange. Above that
mid driver is the Esotar2 soft-dome tweeter -- Dynaudio’s best.
Overall, it’s an impressive array of drive-units: the two bass
drivers have a theoretical advantage over a single unit in the areas
of output capability and low distortion. Relieving the 5.75”
midrange of bass duties at 400Hz also lets Dynaudio use a smaller
driver in the midband, which could produce a better-behaved response
at the top of its passband (the larger the driver, the more trouble
it has reproducing higher frequencies). Being a three-way, the Focus
360 also avoids having the midrange reproduce bass frequencies,
which should translate into lower distortion as well. Lastly, the
Esotar2 tweeter, crossed over at 2200Hz to the midrange, handles
power famously well, and (I came to find out) gives up nothing to
some of the stiffer, more exotic diaphragm materials available to
speaker manufacturers today. The Focus 360 has a claimed frequency
response of 31Hz-25kHz, +/-3dB -- when room gain is taken into
account, that’s almost full-range sound.

The Focus 360 has
a single set of good-quality binding posts for single wiring, these
recessed in a terminal cup at the speaker’s bottom rear. Above that
cup is a flared plastic port for the reflex loading of the bass
drivers. Peering into this port, I noted the foam lining the
cabinet’s interior walls, and could see at least two shelf braces
for added panel stiffness. Although the cabinet isn’t what I’d call
dead, knocking on it produced no thin or rattly sound. The
360’s simple-looking but beautiful cabinetwork is offset by an
understated black plinth at the bottom, a small Dynaudio logo
affixed to its front. The grilles are a bit cheesy in construction,
with tiny plastic pins that are sure to break if used often.
But I’d rather a manufacturer skimp on the grilles than on the
speaker itself -- and anyway, I almost never use speaker grilles.
Screw-in floor spikes are provided.

The Focus 360 is
available in four real-wood finishes: Maple, Cherry, Rosewood, and
Black Ash. My Maple samples were flawlessly finished with
book-matched grain.

Sound

The most striking
aspect of the Focus 360’s sound was its neutral midrange. I found it
so lacking in coloration that it highlighted, in comparison,
the relatively non-neutral sounds of most other speakers.
This was true with the voices of both male and female singers. For
instance, Michael Bublé’s “Always On My Mind,” from his Call Me
Irresponsible (CD, Reprise 100313), was tonally natural, full of
information, and palpably in my room. Bublé’s voice on this
recording is a touch larger than life, and that’s how the Focus 360s
presented it within their well-delineated soundstage, reproducing
all the detail in his voice with a neutral sonic demeanor. There was
no editorializing in the midrange -- something that any true
high-fidelity speaker must not do.

Bass was taut,
but not too much so. It was quite natural and neutral --
characteristics that were the hallmarks of the speaker overall,
though they were still most audible in the midband. Still, the Focus
360 was able to admirably energize my room with bass with tracks
such as “Low,” from electric bassist Jonas Hellborg’s The Silent
Life (CD, Day Eight Music 26). The 360s did more than just hint
at how low the electric bass guitar can play -- they had genuine
weight and solidity well into the 30-40Hz region in my room. The
bass was also nicely articulated and plucky, with smooth transitions
up into the midbass. The bass frequencies were a fully integrated
part of the whole picture, indicating a good blending of the
drivers’ outputs. Admittedly, the 360s couldn’t do subwoofer-type
bass and shake the whole room -- but neither did they blow up when I
experimented with recordings that go ultralow. With the great bulk
of the music I listened to, I never felt the need to hook up a sub.

The highs, too,
were quite good. In fact, this is an area audiophiles need to pay
particular attention to when auditioning the Focus 360. If you
assume that only an exotic hard-domed tweeter can sound
ultradetailed and airy, you’ll be surprised to find out that the
Esotar2 in the Focus 360 can deliver all the detail and air you
could ever want. I listened to many, many tracks to determine just
where the Esotar2’s weak spots were, and man, did I have a hard time
finding any. The Indigo Girls’ “Get Out the Map,” performed live on
Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music (CD, Arista
07822-19081-2), includes some distinctive crowd noises at the
beginning of the song, as the voices are accompanied by some simple
pluckings of a banjo. The Dynaudios fully differentiated these
sounds from one another in space, while weaving a nice ambience that
suffused my Music Vault. The sound was both extended in frequency
and light on its feet, with great density of information.

The 360s’
soundstaging and imaging were very good to excellent. I could easily
map performers on the soundstage, which was both wide and deep,
aided no doubt by my room, which has a good sound of its own. An
example was violinist Marianne Thorsen’s recording of the Allegro
of Mozart’s Violin Concerto 4, K.218, with Øyvind Gimse and the
Trondheimsolistene, from the 2L sampler The Nordic Sound
(BD/SACD, 2L 2L-RR1-SABD; Thorsen’s recordings of Concertos 3-5 are
available on 2L 2L38SACD). The performers were impressively spread
across my room, with images clearly located beyond the speakers’
outer side panels, when appropriate. There was none of the image
wander that indicates a poorly matched pair of speakers. Central
images were scaled just right, and images didn’t seem too tall or
too short.

At this point, it
might sound as if the Focus 360 was almost a perfect speaker. Not
quite. The one area that could stand improving is its overall
transparency -- its ability to lift that last thin veil that
prevents tiny details in the recording from reaching the
listener. This is a very small flaw -- the Focus 360 just barely
fails to communicate only that last iota of microdetail. I noticed
this most in the upper and lower bass, though it did extend a bit
into the lower midrange.

Against . . .

I had on hand an
interesting comparison loudspeaker: the
Paradigm Reference Signature S2 v.3. At $2598/pair, the Paradigm
costs less than half as much as Dynaudio’s Focus 360. However, as
you perhaps read in my “The World’s Best Audio System,” in March
2010, the Paradigm easily competed with speakers costing much more
than themselves. Against the Focus 360, the Paradigm was quite
competitive in the mids and highs. Of course, the major design
advantages you’re paying for with the Dynaudio are its two bass
drivers, its three-way configuration, and a big enough cabinet to
house it all, and those advantages pay dividends -- as would be
expected, the Paradigm is no match for the Dynaudio in the bass. The
Focus 360 simply goes lower, and with excellent fidelity.

The midrange was
another matter. If you expected these two well-designed loudspeakers
to sound exactly alike in that region, well, they don’t. The
Dynaudio was simply more neutral, sounding like nothing if not the
actual recording playing through them. The Focus 360 was the epitome
of uncolored. The Paradigm, on the other hand, was mostly
neutral. It had a touch more energy in the lower midrange, however,
that made it sound just a bit richer and more tonally full. This was
most obvious with male voices, of which the Paradigm cast slightly
more bottom-heavy, fuller images. I got the sense that these two
sound characteristics were carefully chosen: The Paradigm warmed up
the lower mids a smidgen to make up for its lack of low bass, while
Dynaudio, which did produce true bass, let the mids stay as neutral
as could be.

It was in the
highs that I expected to hear huge differences between the two
models -- how could the Paradigm’s beryllium tweeter and the
Dynaudio’s soft dome sound in any way similar? Well, they did. In
fact, with some tracks, if you could isolate just the highs,
the two speakers were virtual overlays of each other. I guess that
goes to show that you can’t simply look at driver material and
assume that you know how that driver will sound in the context of a
given speaker model. The implementations of these materials are
keys, and in this case the disparate materials are incorporated into
great tweeters, and these tweeters designed into terrific
loudspeakers. Simply put, both tweeters were champs at retrieving
detail, and at producing a clean response out to the highest highs.
I could trip up neither of them, even when I played high-resolution
material with ample energy up top.

Summing up

Manufacturers of
high-value loudspeakers whose products challenge far more expensive
gear aren’t all that common. Two speakers that come to mind are the
PSB Synchrony One ($5000/per pair) and the Paradigm Reference
Signature S8 v.3 ($6500/pair). Both have set standards for what can
be achieved at their respective real-world prices, delivering
full-range sound that you just wouldn’t expect for that money. Up to
now, Dynaudio had no model that could directly compete with them in
terms of performance for price.

That has changed.
The Dynaudio Focus 360 offers a lot of performance for
$7000/pair. In fact, in terms of value, it’s the most impressive
speaker I’ve yet heard from the specialty Danish manufacturer -- and
one of the most impressive speakers I’ve reviewed in some time.

The Focus 360 is big, bold, and surpassed my
expectations. I can’t imagine Dynaudio not selling a lot of them.
It’s easily one of the best loudspeaker values now available.